Museums in Orissa
Orissa State Museum, Bhubaneshwar
The Orissa State Museum began as a subsidiary of Ravenshaw College's Department
of Histoiy. However, over the years it has become one of the premier institutions
of the state with a wide range of antiquities representing the region's rich
cultural heritage. The galleries cover archaeology, epigraphy, numismatics,
armoury, mining and geology, painting, anthropology and manuscripts.
The manuscript gallery here is significant as it contains some rare palm leaf
manuscripts. The 50,000 manuscripts, some of which are beautifully illustrated,
cover subjects as diverse as religion, philosophy, astronomy,astrology, poetry,
science, medicine, mathematics, warfare and the crafts. The oldest manuscript
dates to the 15th century though evidence reveals that this art existed as far
back as the 6th century AD.
Palm leaves were dried and the Oriya script was incised into the leaf with a
stylus.The manuscripts are incredibly rich in exquisite penmanship and are a
repository of artistic expressions of that time. The costumes, jewellery, hairstyle
and facial features are very similar to the Orissa temple sculpture. The scenery
depicted is highly stylised and symbolic. The earliest palm leaf manuscript
i the Abhinava Gita Govinda b-Chandra Das Dibakar Mishra by Sridhar Sharma,
dated 1496.
A 1690 illustrated manuscript of Gita Govinda written by the 12th century poetjayadeva
has 80 folios It displays the advanced writing technology of its time in its
drawings on both sides of palm leaves, in rich primary colours undiminished
bv time.
Archeological Museum, Konark
The site museum was established ai Konark in 1968, On view are pieces sculpture
retrieved from the Sun Te The fragments, some small, some large follow the architectural
and artistic patterns of the temple and depict aspects of the religious, social
and economic of the people of Orissa during the 13th century.
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